The Year In Film: The Ten Sexiest Movies of 2016

Richard Linklater, like Robert Bresson before him, has a way with casting the hottest dudes on planet earth to act out his philosophical treatises. Linklater, however, is less coy about showing off the finer features of his strapping players. Here he has a whole floorshow of hotness—a college baseball team in the early 80s—just itching to invade personal, social and academic spaces. While these diamond-cut players wonder about their place in the universe, they sneak into every imaginable scene, trying to see how much of that great unknown they can conquer. But also, everybody just wants to get laid, and most everyone does, for which the audience can be thankful. Every sixpack and tricep on display made 2016 a little more tolerable and a little more magical. Scout Tafoya

I never read the bestseller paperback source, and Tate Taylor’s adaptation (justly dismissed as this year’s Gone Girl) derails about three quarters of the way through, but for a while, it builds up an admirable tension founded on alcoholic amnesia and lonely sexual jealousy, grounded by the groggy performance of Emily Blunt as the unreliable, not terribly bright Girl, Rachel. The sexiness comes from a supporting character, a neighbor of both her and her ex-husband’s new family, Megan, around whom multiple characters’ sexual, and deadly, mistakes revolve. Hot bottle blonde Haley Bennett plays her as an attractive, manipulative blank—a mere triggerer of plot devices, but a very watchable one. Justin Stewart

Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden is a highly stylized, luscious film filled with enough double crosses and nudity to qualify as an erotic thriller. Its centerpiece lesbian sex scene is shown twice, from different narrative perspectives, and has the kind of panting, pretty quality that while not entirely realistic, makes for memorably seductive viewing. Everything in the film is sumptuous: gloves, shoes, corsets, baths, lollipops—this two-and-a-half-hour gem is sprawling with horny affectations. Abbey Bender

The Legend of Tarzan

You know what’s sexy? Not colonialism! Even David Yates, the director of the bizarre, outlandish, and thrilling The Legend of Tarzan knows that, and his iteration of the jungle man is cognizant of that, too. We all love a guy with abs you could do laundry on who is also “woke,” as the kids say. In all seriousness, Yates knows how to use the camera to transform Tarzan into a pulpy pinup character, whose masculine energy oozes from his pores and whose scintillating sexiness increases tenfold in the rain. Kyle Turner

Director Barry Jenkins’s rhapsody in blue abides by quiet confidence. Moonlight‘s central sex scene, beginning as just two buds sharing a blunt on the beach, holds steadily on the extra details: a thumb’s gentle caress, a moment’s hesitance before a passionate kiss, and fingers through the sand. Even if no sex act were displayed (and when it is, it’s approached with respectful distance), the eroticism would still burn through their touch, or through their eyes. Max Kyburz

Arnaud Desplechin examines, with endearing French talkiness, the elasticity of time in one’s biography and the centrality of certain episodes–usually involving sex–that occupy relatively little actual time. Like his New Wave forebears, he abhors gratuitous sentimentality but is intensely interested in deconstructing sentiment and romance. That preoccupation itself is cagily seductive. Jonathan Stevenson

The entirety of Gabriel Mascaro’s very human film—about the crisscrossing loves, lusts and hopes of a bull handler/needleworker and his limited orbit in Brazil—is sexual, including the workaday scenes of bull semen extraction, rodeos and even a man sewing a dress. The erotic final sex session between the protagonist and a very pregnant woman on a factory’s metal table is only the climactic cherry on top. Justin Stewart

Nerve

Is that pervy? It’s all neon and internet-romantic and Dave Franco and Emma Roberts run through a store in their underwear. Doesn’t that sound sort of like a Sofia Coppola movie? Jesse Hassenger

What’s hotter than a well-hung dude wandering the wilderness in various states of undress? Turn him into a living saint and mortify him at every turn. João Pedro Rodrigues’s sweaty tale of spiritual wanderlust and confusion has more skin than you could shake a cross at. Paul Hamy is our hero birdwatcher, out looking for solitude, who instead encounters one deadly offer of carnal congress after another. There are doe-eyed twink shepherds, topless huntresses, a pair of sadistic, sexual pilgrims, lots of symbolic animals—and Hamy almost has sex with the lot of them. Bulges and religious iconography go together like a well-hung horse and carriage in The Ornithologist. Scout Tafoya

Sunset Song is filled with warm and generous light. The most recent film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s 1932 novel is a lovingly rendered work about stepping outside of oneself and embracing the surrounding world. The main character of British filmmaker Terence Davies’s lush classical wonder is Chris (played by Agyness Deyn), a Scottish farm girl in the early 20th century who grows up with hard knowledge of death and other forms of loss and, in response, dreams of living the best possible life. Her dreams include marriage, which she makes real with Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), a shorter, more vulnerable person who opens himself to her briefly before World War I pulls him away. Their early scenes of shared contact—which yes, include one of wedding-night bliss—express two people committing to share themselves with each other as fully as they can. These scenes also express a deep satisfaction from doing so, particularly on the part of Chris, whose giving of herself to her husband enriches and strengthens her for years to come. AaronCutler